So we've gone over Jerry's twin settings in detail, what he did and why he might have done it. I found an situation of another guitar player using a Fender style preamp in a pretty radical way... David Gilmour.

Here is a shot of David's rig from the Pulse tour, the Alembic F2b is highlighted:

He's only using the tone stack of Channel B, since Channel A was repurposed for an additional gain stage. The Inputs have been rerouted to the back by either Phil Taylor or Pete Cornish.

The settings are:

Gain: 6, Bass: 1, Mids: 10, Treble 8

These setting yield a much flatter curve than Jerry's, although they do have the same basic shape. Jerry had a much more pronounced cut on the bass end. Also note that there are 5 GE-7's in David's rig! According to Pete Cornish on the 3 on the righ and 1 on the left were used.

So for those of you that get the urge to start cranking that Bass knob up when searching for "the tone"... Don't!

It's interesting that these two guys use similar settings - both generally had outstanding tone. I wonder if Steve Howe does a similar thing too - he was a Fender guy (Dual Showman I think) and had a super bright, cutting sound. Dunno his bass and mid settings but his treble has to be pegged.

DAMN! Gilmore is a guitar GOD. His Live tone is freaking impeccable, and I think has gone above and beyond live tone perfection as compared to the Dead's approach. The division bell tour sound was beyond killer in comparison to 94 tour, which is about as far back as I can remember particular concerts . He was one reason I went with BK Butler amps and the fact that Jerry used his reverb and I lived in Denver at the time, Where BK is from. It is so hard to know back in the day where he uses what when though, but I am sure it is all figured out now on the net now a days. Very cool Rat

I am sure that is a tech's nightmare though... Good thing he uses a buffer too.

If you find guitar players using Fender heads into Marshall 4-12" cab's, quite often you'll find them completely or nearly dumping the bass like Jerry and boosting the treble nearly to the top. There's SO much excessive bass in the Fender EQ for "guitar" purposes, that really anything above 3 is generally problematically muddy. DG is perfect example again of how vital it is to remove the low bass from a guitar tone if you want to cut thru and fit in an ensemble. I do know some guitarists who will go 10,10,10, or similar on their Fenders going for the fattest biggest hugest sound possible, but that only seems to work in an SRV trio type setting where the one guitar is the everything sound and bass guitar has to fight to play along. I find the bass-off approach still gives enough fatness to sound balanced and correct. Depending on the setting though, I will gravitate toward those Gilmour settings to just beef things up a bit. The Dead was a large band and Jerry found out how to carve his notch in the mix.

And yes, David Gilmour has a tone-nut following (me partially included) that does rival the intensity of us here with our Jerry-tone-love. They're pretty obsessive, but I still think we win.

The diming of the Mids negates some of the dumping of all that bass. Although that only what the tone stack calculator shows, which is only a 2d predicted curve. Plus, it's needs to be mentioned that David's preamp had the bass cap value changed to reduce bass response, almost like Jerry's . Changing the bass cap to a lower value also yield more harmonic content for notes in the lowest octave of the guitar.

While scouring the 'net for pics of the innards of an F2b, I came across this link... Not only is it the innards, but it's alledgely one of Phil Lesh's originals: